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YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers

  • YouTube is intensifying efforts to combat adblockers, including blocking video playback and warning users of potential account suspension.
  • Increased ads on YouTube have driven many users to adblockers, hurting both YouTube’s ad revenue and content creators reliant on ad-based income.
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.
swordgeek ,

Youtube is waging a war against their customers. If they win, they lose; and if they lose they win.

copd ,

Wheres the data to back up this claim? That article is purely opinion

ArchRecord , (edited )

Good fucking riddance.

The sooner they realize the enshittification isn’t working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they’ll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.

YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won’t stop people from using ad blockers!

And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don’t even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn’t instantaneously bring in immense profits.

And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it’s sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.

I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn’t.

Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube’s own platform.

YouTube can’t see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it’s blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.

TechnologyChef ,

The worst of all issues to me was any interruption working to help feed people or the destitute immediately has a 5 second skip, while all else has 59, 30, 20, 14 skip. There was no benefit for good externalities, just cost and profit. I was even ok with ads around 5 seconds and that they can even show up before watching a video. Adding the countdown was a nice touch too. It’s when it gets in the way of UI/UX, how you have to suffer through the same commercial over and over, interrupting a video at critical moments, and ending videos with an ad so that you don’t know if the video is ended that it gets awful to use. I would hope someone gets to making it 5 second ads that don’t take away from the experience.

HerrBeter ,

Start 2x30 second ads

During video here’s an ad för my sponsor “braid narrow legends”

Buy my merch on www.mymerch.dog

Outro youtube ads

drmoose ,

I find the whole thing so ugly even as a youtube plus subscriber. How much possibly you could gain here? isn’t youtube already profitable and being run by one of the world’s richest corporations? just let people watch and educate themselves and whatnot.

airportline ,
@airportline@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m begging google to just bring back YouTube Premium Lite and expand it

Brkdncr ,

lol no they arent.

azl ,

I pay for Nebula and try to watch as much as I can there. The content is more “pleasant department store” and less “Mexican public market”.

I do watch YouTube regularly when channel-surfing, but if I ever see an ad (which happens only on mobile devices), I close it immediately and do something else. It’s not that I don’t think I should be able to watch everything for $0, but YouTube ads are so jarring, random, irrelevant and just make me sick. They literally ruin whatever I was watching and make me sad to exist.

It can be exhausting to wade through the absolute meat market of click bait titles and thumbnails to find something that not only looks interesting but won’t abuse me with infomercial-form audio/visuals.

YouTube enables and promotes the “content creators” who abuse human psychology to accumulate views, likes, subscriptions, etc. The best thing that could happen is they continue to be exposed as the drug dealer they are.

Chip_Rat ,

So I paid for nebula, but it seems totally vacant. I’m not mad, I’m happy to spend the money supporting small creators/any independent endeavour, but am I missing something??

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

it seems totally vacant

OP did say that “the content is more “pleasant department store””. Have you been to a department store lately? They’re pretty vacant lol

Firoaren ,

I’d check out the podcasts - I like It’s Probably Not Aliens

cammoblammo ,

The app isn’t exactly optimised for finding content. There’s a lot on there, but it always takes me a while to figure out which submenu gives me the goodies.

Evrala ,

I’ll be honest, one of the parts I really like about the show Jet Lag is when they reccomend channels to watch at the end of the episode.

Angry_Autist ,

It’s relatively new and has a small userbase. I doubt it will ever get as active as youtube but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Ragnarok314159 ,

It’s always laughable to me that these companies are able to have the meta data on our entire lives and yet show ads for shit we don’t even want.

smeenz ,

Not to mention 50 different variants of the same annoying ad, so that even when you block it, you have to do it 49 more times to actually stop seeing it.

And the problem with the same irrelevant and animated ad repeated 5 times on the same webpage

Andonyx ,

Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.

Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.

Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.

Lynx ,
@Lynx@jlai.lu avatar

Shit you don’t want yet. That’s the idea of ads, trying to sell you shit you don’t want or need. Why advertise the stuff that you’re already buying?

saplyng ,

Because an animated 5 second ad telling me to buy more dice and horde them like the goblin I am would work on me!

Thorny_Insight ,

Advertisements are for a large part about brand recognization. Even if you’re not going to buy the product, the fact that you remember the brand means the ad has worked.

Angry_Autist ,

There are tons of products I’d impulse buy, old lego sets, spice and hot sauce samplers, custom gaming dice.

I won’t normally go out to shop for them but if they show up as an ad I may click and buy.

But they NEVER advertise anything to me that I like or am interested in. It’s always bullshit

Angry_Autist ,

the thought is “not what you want, what THEY want you to want”.

If your favorite brands and IPs aren’t as profitable as Mypillow and Regressive Fake University ads (well not mypillow anymore thankfully)

That’s the key difference and why nearly every idle auto-play leads to the alt-right within a few hundred views.

Evrala ,

I’m a lesbian, Google has enough data on me to know I’m a lesbian, I live with women, don’t really hang out with men at all. I use a bunch of Google services so I know Google knows this about my living situation.

SO MANY FUCKING ADS FOR MANSCAPED, WHHHYYYYY. I am not the target market for this Google.

I’ve taken to blocking the ads, still more Manscaped. Is it cause blocking = engagement? “Oh wow, she interacted with this ad to block it but ignored the others, what a good ad placement!”

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

The sickos “haha yes” meme

chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Worse part of the problem is knowing what part of the ad profit YouTube uses to pay MrBeast and his stupid content.

Angry_Autist ,

There isn’t a big streamer that doesn’t strike me as a creepy tryhard.

x00z ,
@x00z@lemmy.world avatar

They kept trying to ruin my experience so I’ve switched to Invidious and Odysee.

Invidious only for the content creators that don’t crosspost to Odysee yet.

WhyJiffie ,
  • Despite these measures, many users are leaving YouTube or finding workarounds, leading creators to seek alternative revenue streams off-platform.

That is the best part of it! A very welcome change! Basically the first step of becoming an independent creator, and to being able to abandon youtube for any of them.

cybersandwich ,

Floatplane is Linus’ smartest decision he’s made. It’s going to be needed.

lemann ,

Platforms like Floatplane, Nebula, Patreon etc make it so easy to support creators outside of YouTube, while also giving creators a larger share of income compared to Adsense.

There’s YouTube Premium… but I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to give Google a single cent of my hard earned cash

simonced ,

I already have Pixel phones, they can already spy on me. No f’ing way I pay to remove enshitification. Also, they’ll increase the price regularly anyway. If they want ppl to pay, they could just paywall the whole thing, well see who’s left after that lol.

Ilovethebomb ,

I’ve actually looked at these platforms as someone who has taken YouTube semi seriously in the past, and there are two major issues with them.

The first is, they don’t allow just anyone to upload video, you must already be an established creator. Second, there is no free access for viewers, meaning someone isn’t likely to share a link to your video with friends.

YouTube really does have a monopoly.

desertdruid ,

Linus

Let’s hope he doesn’t have access to any critical email account related to that service.

Bakersfield ,

I’m out of the loop. What’s that referencing?

cybersandwich ,

Linus got phished out of his twitter account recently.

Respect where it’s due. He owned it and was transparent so everyone can learn. Apparently he was at a pool party and just about to throw the burgers on the grill when he got an email that said his account was logged into from Turkey or Russia or someplace.

He panicked a bit, because of the last time his YouTube account was hacked he felt like acting quickly was the only thing that help it not be worse. I think he clicked the link in the email and “logged in” and boom. Got em.

Caught him at the right time and place and it all aligned to burn him.

Bakersfield ,

That sucks. Thanks for the info.

Did he end up getting his account back?

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Torvalds?

cybersandwich ,

Sebatianalds

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Van Pelt.

01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

No. Of LTT

echodot ,

Despite all of their machinations my strategy of simply ignoring literally everything they say and continuing doing the same old same old appears to be flummoxing them.

I’ve literally not done anything and have never experienced any inconvenience. Are we sure they’re doing anything at all?

sem ,

Same, I think they must be AB testing and I don’t get assigned into the shitty group

tempest ,

They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.

smeenz ,

I had the same experience with shitty playback buffering every few seconds on popular videos that should be cached on a nearby cdn, and then saw lots of articles about it and then boom a week later everything was back to normal

dumbass ,
@dumbass@leminal.space avatar

I thought I was getting that blank screen long pause before videos, turns out my phone cable was damaged, fixed it and YouTube’s back to normal.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Wait, how would a phone cable cause a symptom like that…?

dumbass ,
@dumbass@leminal.space avatar

I’m guessing some of the wires being broken caused congestion or sonething, I dont know why it did it, I just know once I fixed the cable it was fine.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Was the video signal going through it? Otherwise, sounds more like a coincidence.

Fades ,

100% coincidence

smeenz ,

Maybe they’re using the phone line for their Internet ? Vsdl etc…

mightyfoolish ,

Your phone could have been switching power profiles incorrectly due to your phone rapidly switching between charging and not charging (and perhaps with a low power state depending on battery level).

@ripcord Just my guess.

Fades ,

And this phone cable damage only impacted youtube lol

Angry_Autist ,

MBAs are taught they can shape human behavior with decades disproven assumptions.

It’s fallout like this that shows their hand.

“Oh, the customers don’t like it? Fine we do it twice as hard” is fucking Pavlovian training and the executives behind the initiative should be sealed in an underground vault knee deep in hungry roaches.

SaharaMaleikuhm ,

I’d rather not watch YouTube videos at all than videos with ads.

polle ,

Smarttube stopped working some weeks ago for a day. I tried watching YouTube with ads, the experience was so fucking insane to me. Like multiple, non skipable ads before the video starts + more ads during the video. It just was unwatchable. Its just unusable.

WeebLife ,

Try grayjay

Vathsade ,

Newpipe still works (Google may break it, but the app is usually updated in a couple days and it works again)

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s my current lineup.

Newpipe Freetube Greyjay Tubular Brave

They get through all those, I’m just going to surf peertube or odysee

Angry_Autist ,

I don’t mind one or two of their old 5 second ads, but anything beyond that is unacceptable especially on a 2 min vid.

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